Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...squadron, a fighter outfit, is stationed at Janneby West, somewhere on the Western front, and its only task is the increasingly hopeless one of stemming the Allied tide of bombers and fighters. Pampered "knights-of-the-air" with extra rations, flashy scarves and cock-of-the-walk manners, the pilots go up to drink the "black champagne" of death. Up in the "blue shell" of the sky with "the needles on the instrument panels as light as ghosts' tongues," the fighter pilots "hammer their woodpecker's tune, exact, refined and cruel," and they die. Civilians blunder into...
...late. Born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1878, of British-immigrant parents (his father was a railroad mechanic), he was a top Annapolis graduate, class of 1901, who spent the next 40 years learning all there was to know about surface ships, submarines and naval aviation. (He qualified as a pilot at 48.) Approaching retirement age (64) in 1941, he was saved from the shelf by the Navy's need for a boss as tough as the five-ocean, six-front war it was about to fight...
...William P. (for Powell) Lear, 54, a restless, uninhibited manufacturer-inventor (Lear, Inc.), has been flying his Cessna 310 plane around Europe on a businessman's crusade. He wanted to show Europeans how simple and safe it was to fly their own planes, especially with the Lear automatic pilot, the Lear automatic direction finder and the Lear omnirange navigational system. Fortnight ago, in Hamburg, Bill Lear got an even better idea. Why not be the first postwar private flyer to go to Moscow and show off U.S. equipment...
Though no private U.S. pilot had ever flown across Red-occupied Germany to Berlin, Lear took off and soon landed at Berlin's Tempelhof airport. Then he bustled over to East Berlin to see the Soviets about permission to fly to Moscow...
...embargo list. All aviation equipment is on the NATO embargo list, including General Twining's DC-6." From what he had seen of Red equipment, added Lear, the Russians could probably use some of his flight aids. On their prize Tu-104 jet transport, for example, the auto pilot was "right out of our old B17. You can buy one in any junk market for six dollars." But, said Lear, he was not planning to sell "a single bolt or screw" to the Russians...